''I was kicking myself for not getting a flu shot but appears you don't need one. I feel great.''

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In the past week, Jackman has also been nominated for American, Australian and British academy awards for playing the reformed prisoner Jean Valjean in the musical. Les Miserables also won best motion picture musical or comedy, while the political thriller Argo, about a plan to use a fake movie to free Americans trapped in Iran, surprisingly won best motion picture drama.

Fellow Australian nominees Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Keith Urban and composer Johnny Klimek missed out on awards, but Jackman provided one of the highlights with a warm speech that revealed he considered dropping out of Les Miserables three weeks before filming after a terrible day at rehearsal. ''My wife talked me off that cliff,'' he said.

Golden Globe Awards 2013

''Baby, I'm going to say now in front of the entire world: thank-you for always being right.''

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association produced a number of surprises at an awards wittily hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

The favourite to win best picture at the Academy Awards, Steven Spielberg's presidential bio-pic Lincoln, won only best actor in a motion picture drama for Daniel Day-Lewis.

''Are you sure there's room for another ex-president on this stage,'' he joked in a reference to an earlier appearance by the former US president Bill Clinton who introduced a clip for the movie.

In the television categories, the big winners were the drama Homeland, about a US marine returned from Iraq who has been turned by the enemy, and the comic-drama Girls, about the romantic misadventures of twentysomething young women in New York.

Homeland won best TV drama, with Damian Lewis and Claire Danes winning the best actor and actress in a TV drama.

Danes said her fellow nominees - Glenn Close (Damages), Connie Britton (Nashville), Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) and Julianna Marguiles (The Good Wife) - ''have all in their own way contributed to making television this wonderfully rich place for really dynamic, complex, bold female characters''.

More tributes to women on television came when an emotional Lena Dunham won best actress in a TV comedy, beating the better-known Fey (30 Rock), Zooey Deschanel (New Girl), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep) and Poehler (Parks and Recreation).

The creator and star of Girls said the four comic actresses had helped her through some of the darkest times in her life.

''Julia, Tina, Amy and Zooey respectively got me through middle school, mono, a ruptured eardrum and the acute floating anxieties that populate my entire life and I worship them.''

Girls was also the surprise winner of best TV comedy ahead of Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, Episodes and Smash.